Shiloh Krupar, 2007, “A Janitorial Junket: Sweeping the Debris of Shanghai’s Future,” Radical History Review 98, 155-177, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2006-032
ABSTRACT:
This visual essay was inspired by the literary montages of Walter Benjamin and the creative geographies of Allan Pred. The following pages attempt to perform a visual “sweep across” the ruin of Shanghai futures and a textual “sweeping up” of quotations about the city and the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall’s (SUPEH) spectacular exhibitions, reception, and maintenance. This representational strategy heeds Susan Buck-Morss’s reminder that “if Benjamin threw the traditional language of metaphysics into the junkroom, it was to rescue the metaphysical experience of the objective world, not to see philosophy dissolve into the play of language itself.” All images are courtesy of the author and were taken by camera or digital video during three periods of fieldwork, between 2001 – 6, at the SUPEH in Shanghai, China. Fieldnotes and interview segments from SUPEH visitors and managers were also collected during that time.
